Crime is recognized as a constant factor within human society, but in the twenty-first century organized crime is emerging as one of the distinctive security threats of the new world order. The more complex, organized and interconnected society becomes, its crime becomes too.

This book recognizes that the new century will be defined in part by a struggle between an upperworld, defined by increasingly open economic systems and democratic politics, and a transnational, entrepreneurial, dynamic and richly varied underworld, willing and able to use and distort these trends for...